Book shows that viaduct tunnel debate is nothing new

A new book by a WSU history professor details how the 1960s era fight to save Pike Place Market gave rise to a new ‘urban sustainability’ movement. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer file photo/Mike Urban)

Seattle business interests battling Greens and neighborhood groups over a downtown development project. No, this isn’t a story about the tunnel replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct. In “Seattle & the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia,” historian Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the creation of Emerald City fault lines that continue to dominate local political debates.

Sanders, a Washington State University assistant professor, spends much of his time looking at the 1960s battle over Pike Place Market. Influenced by a wave of “urban renewal” projects across the country paid for by federal dollars, the downtown business community wanted to redevelop the iconic market. Their aim was to build mixed use housing and other amenities to help attract shoppers and people they saw heading to the suburbs. But a broad coalition of environmentalists, designers and other activists – led by the late Victor Steinbrueck, a University of Washington architecture professor – fought the idea, arguing that the historic market was essential for maintaining the city’s character and vibrancy. The clash culminated in a November 1971 ordinance passed by Seattle voters that preserved the market as it exists today.

Sanders well-researched book also examines disputes about the Central District and Discovery Park, and culminates with the 1990s debate over the Seattle Commons, an ill-fated push to redevelop the South Lake Union area. Some of the protagonists in the Commons fight are still active in the tunnel controversy. Sanders writes about Frank Chopp, who, prior to becoming the ultra powerful speaker of the state House of Representatives, was a vocal neighborhood activist who once built a geodesic dome in a rented parking space and railed against poor people being pushed out by gentrification. John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition also makes an appearance.

While sympathetic to the concerns of environmentalists and other neighborhood activists, Sanders doesn’t gloss over the unintended consequences of some of their crusades. When the Commons Plan was defeated in the mid 1990s by people who feared over commercialized development, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen was left with a big stretch of land he had intended to donate to the city, partially for a park. Allen then set out to remake the neighborhood as a biotech center, a push that continues to this day, one that has drastically changed the neighborhood Commons foes wanted to preserve.

“Seattle & the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia,” published by University of Pittsburgh Press, is a good primer on how our city’s complex politics came to be.